Anyone convert from top nav back to tripane?

[skwpt]

A few of my most vocal developers avidly dislike top nav. They want to see pretty much the whole doc set contents at once.

I looked through the Flare docs, and there's a tutorial on converting from tripane to to nav, but I could not find anything going in the opposite direction.

I was hoping to figure this out on my own (I love a good challenge) but I'm a 1-person doc shop and new to Flare, to boot. The conversion doesn't look trivial.

Has anyone done this? If so, would you be willing to share pointers and/or tips/gotchas?

[doc_guy]

Do the following:

1. Create a new skin in your project. This will be an HTML5 skin (not TopNav). You can worry about colors and stuff later.
2. Create a new masterpage for your online output. This is important because I'm assuming you are going to want different proxies on this masterpage, and we don't want to modify your working TopNav one at this point until you're sure you want to switch.
3. Create a new target file in your project. This is an HTML5 target. Make sure you select the following: (1) a TOC; (2) your correct (new) master page; and (3) your correct (new) skin file.
4. Publish your new target file.

It should be fairly simple to go back. The trick on migrating TO TopNav is that you have to set up different skin components and create a landing page etc. Going back to a tri-pane option should be pretty simple. Of course, then you'll want to customize the skin for your look and feel, which brings its own set of challenges, but you should be able to have working tri-pane output in fewer than 15 minutes (and that is only if your project takes a long time to load; more like 5 minutes if it is a smaller project).

[skwpt]

Thank you! I will try this after my release on Friday.